Investing Education

What this section covers

Investing rewards patience and punishes activity, which is why most of the difficulty is behavioural rather than intellectual. The mechanics — asset allocation, diversification, cost, rebalancing — are genuinely simple. Applying them consistently for twenty years is the hard part.

These guides cover portfolio construction, index versus active management, asset allocation by horizon, dollar-cost averaging, rebalancing, risk and the tax treatment of different account types. Each one explains the reasoning as well as the recommendation, so you can judge whether it fits your situation rather than following a rule blindly.

Where a claim depends on assumptions about future returns, the guide states the assumption. Nobody knows what the market will return; the honest approach is to show the arithmetic and let you vary the inputs.

How to use this section

1. 1
   Work out your time horizon and risk capacity first — almost every other decision follows from those two answers.
2. 2
   Read the allocation guide before the product guides. Choosing what to hold matters far more than choosing which fund wrapper to hold it in.
3. 3
   Use the investment-return and DCA calculators to test your own assumptions rather than accepting the examples.